Concentration Camps - Page Text Content

1: A concentration camp is the detainment of people under very harsh conditions where they are forced to work and sometimes sent to death.

2: The first concentration camps were created shortly after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 Henrich Himmler administrated concentration camps and turned them into a system in July 1934 | The Main purpose of these camps was the killing of millions of innocent people

3: By 1942, there were six concentration camps built. Some of them were, Auschwitz, Belzec,Chelmno Majdanek,Sobibor, and T.II. Auschwitz was considered the worst one out of all of them.

4: Camps were made all over Germany.

5: 1.5 million children were killed at these camps. Auschwitz being the one where all kids were sent to.

6: The Jews were rounded up in the Ghetto's and told that they were being shipped to the east, when really they were being taken to the Concentration camps

7: Auschwitz was located in Poland. It was made up of 3 concentration camps in one.

8: People were sent from a forced labor camp to a death camp when they became old or when they were weak to be killed. | About 1 million people were killed at Auschwitz during World War II. | When they would be ordered to take a shower, they didn't know it was a gas chamber they were going into.

9: Hitler showed absolutely no mercy. He believed in the extermination of the Jews and Romanies (gypsies). Most of the extermination camps were small: the aim was to kill newly arrived prisoners within 24-48 hours.

10: Auschwitz was one of the largest camps ever made. | This camp consisted of mainly German communists, social democrats, and trade unionists.

11: In the camps, Jewish police, prisoners who were called Kapos forced other Jews to obey Nazi orders in return for special privelages

12: How the camps operated | At the entrance to the camps, a doctor sat and pointed either left or right. Left meant that they were sent to immediate death, and right meant they were sent to the concentration camp.

13: Within the first few days of being in the camps, thousands of people died from hunger, disease, and beatings.

14: A major disease within the camps was typhus. However, sick people still pretended they were able to work because they knew that sickness meant death

15: Some prisoners were gassed in trucks and trains and never even reached the death camps. The majority of people were sent to death camps, where they were seperated by race and then shoved into the gas chambers

16: The estimated number of Jews killed in Concentration camps is around 1.6 million.